Tag Archive | "imp"

The great advantage of installing a web-based imap client is you can
intercept the mail processing with your own mail filters, even PHP
ones, for example, if you wanted to experiment with some of the PHP Bayes filters recently making the rounds in the blogosphere.

The competition for PHP IMAP clients seems to be largely dominated by Horde‘s IMP, so I went straight for that, not to mention a working Horde installation also gives you access to exciting things like Chora, their CVS/SVN web client.

Now is a good a time as any to jump into Horde, especially as their
3.0 release is just out – from my initial experience things look very
good. On the bright side of things, Horde is a very mature project,
some 4-5 years in the works as I understand it, and the code and
documentation, not to mention the breadth of their libraries, all
reflect the fact. On the other side, although you could argue this
other side only exists for beginners, Horde does take a bit of
concentration to install, it does prefer a linux environment, and there
are PHP newbies who will struggle to get things working. Given the
‘instant gratification’ culture that’s grown up around PHP in general,
I think this could be a reason why the Horde project hasn’t basked in
the limelight perhaps as much as it should have.

With a view to easing the whole Horde installation process, I will
attempt to clarify a few points that I ran into while installing the
software.

Installing Horde

you’ll need root on a modern Linux distro, I used Fedora Core 1 for this exercise

recompile PHP with dom and zlib support, not enabled by default

grab the required xml libs with

up2date libxml2-devel

grab and compile the required zlib stuff with

wget http://www.gzip.org/zlib/zlib-1.2.1.tar.gz

./configure [your usuall stuff] –with-dom –with-zlib

grab horde source

wget ftp://ftp.horde.org/pub/horde/horde-3.0.tar.gz

unpack into your webroot

in horde/config rename *.dist to *.php

for foo in *.dist; do cp $foo `basename $foo .dist`; done

in horde/conf/registry.php I had to hack $webroot as I was using a virtual host

Overall I’ve been finding this a fantastic package, the web client offers that vast majority of what you can get through something like Thunderbird, with the obvious advantage that you can read your mail from any computer. Next step will be the Bayes filter implementation, then chora which I have currently half-working 😉